Dell Goes with Mellanox VPI Combo Cards for IB and 10 GigE

Mellanox announced this week that Dell blade systems are now available with their single adapter cards that do both 40Gb/s InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet for cost-effective connectivity. Designed for data center servers and storage systems, the Mellanox ConnectX-2 I/O mezzanine adapter cards use the company’s Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) technology, which provides the flexibility to support many communication protocols and network fabrics over a single device.

The demands on data center I/O connectivity continue to increase with the deployment of many-core CPUs, virtualization, networked storage, clustered databases, and low-latency applications in financial services, Cloud computing, Web 2.0, and the commercial high-performance computing sector,” said John Monson, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “The combination of Mellanox’s InfiniBand and Ethernet connectivity products and Dell blade servers provides a simplified, cost-effective solution that meets next-generation data center and cluster performance and flexibility requirements, all while reducing capital expense and networking complexity.”

To me, the cool thing about these VPI cards is that they auto-sense the switch fabric and configure their ports to support InfiniBand or Ethernet automatically. With support for industry-standard RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), you can boot from remote InfiniBand or LAN storage targets, which, in theory, would make life a whole lot easier for the hardworking folks out there who keep the datacenter running.